Yamaha is going to launch a new musical interface called Tenori-on. It has been developed by Toshio Iwai and has been showcased in some festivals over the past years (Sonar for instance). It’s encouraging seeing such an experimental device going to mass-production.
In order to promote this new instrument Yamaha has distributed it to a bunch of musicians (and not the worst): Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Matthew Herbert, Mouse On Mars, Cornelius, To Rococo Rot, Jim O’ Rourke, Rei Harakami, Tortoise and Atom Heart… I guess it’s a good way for getting covered by the press.
A few videos, interviews, audio files are available on Yamaha’s website.
I wouldn’t have talked about all of this if Jim O’rourke hadn’t composed a beautiful ambient track with the Tenori-on. Here is the track: http://www.global.yamaha.com/tenori-on…
I’m wondering why YouTube is putting a video of Sarkozy into the Related Videos of mine… That’s weird.
The only link I can see between the 2 videos is that I’m playing with a champaign cooler and Sarkozy is obviously drunk after seeing Poutine at G8… but I guess he rather drank vodka then. Still weird…
“The message” was released by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 in 1982, 25 years ago! I’m watching it and it’s so obvious it’s still influencing today’s hip-hop… think about Beans for instance.
So last thursday I played at the festival Les Digitales. This was the 3rd edition of the festival and as usual it took place in the beautiful park of Mon-Repos in Lausanne. Hopefully, no rain.
Last year I was in the audience so I was pleased to play this year. Unfortunately things didn’t went as smoothly as I had planned… Indeed when my turn came, I got a big issue with my sound card that seemed to be close to death. After 20 minutes trying to figure out what was the actual issue, rebooting many times my laptop, etc, the organizers asked Bacalao (next musician in the program) to start playing. So I got some time for fixing the issue and I actually had to reinstall the driver of my sound card (hopefully I had a local copy). I could play later but I definitely lost some concentration. Moreover, at the beginning of my set I had the (bad) idea to propose a small kid to blow into a straw and make bubbles in my champaign cooler (!). But then some other kids came and started talking to me: “Can you play Michael Jackson?”, and after a while “Can you play some other music?” ;-)… that was fun but didn’t help me much!! So I did quite a lot of mistakes and I completely missed the guitar part compared to what I had planned to do. At least it shows it’s really live music.
Last wednesday I met Nicolas Julliard of the swiss radio Espace 2 for a short interview. Talking about my music is not something I’m very familiar with, so I hope I managed to give some interesting answers.
This was broadcast at noon on thursday June 28th as an introduction to the festival Les Digitales that took place in the afternoon.
Nicolas Bonstein tells Les Digitales story, I love his philosophy.
Below is the text introducing the podcast as you can read it on the website of Espace 2 [in french!].
Les Digitales, l’électronique aux champs
Festival lausannois d’origine, Les Digitales ont essaimé dans plusieurs villes de Suisse avec un concept séduisant: faire jouer des musiciens électro en pleine ville, dans ces poumons de verdure que constituent les parcs publics de Lausanne, de Bienne et de la Chaux-de-Fonds.
Première étape ce soir au Parc Mon-Repos de Lausanne, avec une dizaine de créateurs issus de la scène régionale. Tous ont eu comme consigne de travail un seul mot, «Wasser», à décliner sur une demi-heure comme bon leur semble. Adepte des instruments bricolés, Tokoloten a ainsi conçu un hydrophone, un seau à champagne dans lequel est immergé un micro étanche. Pour d’autres, comme le Collectif I+, duo de violon et violoncelle électriques, le respect de la consigne est de nature plus métaphorique, dans la création de nappes de sons aquatiques.
Nicolas Bonstein, organisateur du festival, détaille l’origine et les enjeux de cette manifestation gratuite en plein air, tandis que Julien Mouille, alias Tokoloten, ainsi que Magali Correvon et Sébastien Golaz du Collectif I+ évoquent leur manière toute personnelle d’aborder la matière électronique.
We’re getting close to Les Digitales, a small open-air festival which focuses on electronic experimental music. It takes place in Mon Repos which likely is the most beautiful park in Lausanne. So it’s next thursday (28th of June) from 4 to 10 p.m. and it’s free. After 10 p.m. it moves to Le Bourg for some other concerts. There are 9 groups/artists playing in the park: Iria Flavia / Collectif I+ / Effedege / Radon / Tokoloten / [sic] / Consor / Larytta / POL (in this order I guess). I play around 6 p.m. If you like listening to special music in a special place it’s worth coming.
I’ll be playing live at Fréquence Banane, the radio run by the students of the University of Lausanne, on saturday (June 9). I know that Larkian will be there (that’s him who proposed me to participate, thanks!) but I have no idea who else plays and how long is the program. I haven’t prepared anything yet, so I guess it’s gonna be a lot improvised. That might be interesting…
Saturday June 9th, FM 92.4 from 22:00 to ? for listening to it.
Some people are asking me what was my setup for the live act I did last saturday. Here it is.
The core of my setup is an Apple Powerbook running Ableton Live with a M-Audio FW410 sound card. I’ve got a TC Electronic Konnekt 24D but the driver doesn’t work well as of now. This time I also brought my Mackie 1202 mixer.
For the noisy part at the beginning of my set, I used a Playstation-like USB game pad for controlling Live. The software I use for mapping the USB data to midi is Steim Junxion. So this game pad works as a midi controller and lets me mute tracks, launch samples, play with effects, etc.
Then comes the second part with the guitar. Here I use a small magnet motor that I put on the guitar’s strings and that makes them vibrate. This is a good way to get harmonics too. The sound from the guitar first goes to a distortion pedal RAT II (I love distortion pedals!), then goes through a multi-effects Adrenalinn II and through a Loop Station Boss RC-2 for loop recording. The signal eventually goes to the mixer.
There’s also a short jack plugged into an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff (the russian one) going to the sound card and hereby to Live. The signal is completely saturated (on purpose) and I use a granulator VST effect on it. On top of that I run a synthesizer and some samples within Live.
The final part (electronica/abstract hip-hop) is fully computer-based. One track for the beats: I use Battery from Native Instruments with a bunch of VST effects (LiveCut and Frohmage for instance). 2 more tracks: one for a synthesizer and one more for the lyrics. I control all of that with a small Doepfer midi controller.
That’s it!
For the visuals, I developed a Processing patch. I already wrote about this in a previous post.
P.S. I posted this screenshot on my Flickr page and I saw yesterday that Joshua Davis added it as a favorite. Cool!
I’ll be playing live at 
